A Difficult Situation • Hacker News Board

Re: A Difficult Situation

#401

Post by throwaway0321 » Fri, Mar 22, 2013, 2:32 AM UTC

rscale wrote: post #278

powertower wrote: post #98

They need to update that statement with the fact that the joke was not about her, nor directed at her. Their statement leaves that very important part out, making the reader think otherwise - that she was the victim. At the same time (or around that time) this was happening, here is a conversation she was having - http://i.imgur.com/nRC5J7f.png Another gem from years ago - http://imgur.com/5tbXR2c I'd imagine she was…

Let's remember: she never asked for him to get fired. And I don't think that was a reasonably foreseeable outcome of her comments. The fact that he was fired leads me to two probable conclusions: 1) that his management was terrible and he'll end up someplace better; or 2) that he was about to be fired anyway. If his management was terrible, it's not a sad story for him in the long-term. If they were going to fire him…

The PlayHaven employee was fired because of this event [1]. What led PlayHaven to conduct the investigation? Adria's tweet and blog post to thousands of followers. This isn't the first time she has used her considerable influence as a weapon[2].

[1]http://blog.playhaven.com/addressing-pycon/

[2]http://amandablumwords.wordpress.com/2013/03/21/3/

Edit: Changed a link.

Re: A Difficult Situation

#402

Post by roguecoder » Fri, Mar 22, 2013, 2:35 AM UTC

powertower wrote: post #98

They need to update that statement with the fact that the joke was not about her, nor directed at her. Their statement leaves that very important part out, making the reader think otherwise - that she was the victim. At the same time (or around that time) this was happening, here is a conversation she was having - http://i.imgur.com/nRC5J7f.png Another gem from years ago - http://imgur.com/5tbXR2c I'd imagine she was…

If you say shit in a public place, you can't turn around and say it's not the business of the people forced to overhear you. You made it their business.

Re: A Difficult Situation

#403

Post by dinkumthinkum » Fri, Mar 22, 2013, 2:40 AM UTC

rscale wrote: post #278

powertower wrote: post #98

They need to update that statement with the fact that the joke was not about her, nor directed at her. Their statement leaves that very important part out, making the reader think otherwise - that she was the victim. At the same time (or around that time) this was happening, here is a conversation she was having - http://i.imgur.com/nRC5J7f.png Another gem from years ago - http://imgur.com/5tbXR2c I'd imagine she was…

Let's remember: she never asked for him to get fired. And I don't think that was a reasonably foreseeable outcome of her comments. The fact that he was fired leads me to two probable conclusions: 1) that his management was terrible and he'll end up someplace better; or 2) that he was about to be fired anyway. If his management was terrible, it's not a sad story for him in the long-term. If they were going to fire him…

Not a foreseeable outcome? Really? You don't think someone being fired is a foreseeable outcome after you attempt to publicly shame them? If so, I'm not sure you would be very good at "foreseeing" things!

Re: A Difficult Situation

#404

Post by burntsushi » Fri, Mar 22, 2013, 2:41 AM UTC

ceol wrote: post #368

burntsushi wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's irrelevant. Here's the concluding mark from the quote: > but the fact that someone who's "on their side" is concerned that their feet will be held to this fire is evidence that there is a lack of empathy from all sides of the debate, and that's a bad thing. He didn't say it was the same. He was commenting on his feelings and his perception of the social atmosphere.

Yeah, but he tried to use it as an example of something that could lead someone to shame him. But... it didn't happen. I don't know many people who would shame someone for assuming an unknown programmer is a man. It sucks, because it does kind of exclude women, but the default gender in our lexicon is aliased to "male." It was pretty tough for me to stop using it and start using "they" instead. It wasn't as tough for…

> Yeah, but he tried to use it as an example of something that could lead someone to shame him.

Right.

> But... it didn't happen.

So?

> I don't know many people who would shame someone for assuming an unknown programmer is a man.

I don't know many people who would shame someone for saying "I'd fork him on GitHub" or making irreverent "dongle" jokes either. But clearly, they exist. And clearly, public shaming can do significant damage.

I understand this to be the central point of the GGGP.

> And I'd like someone to link me to where these two guys, who are still anonymous by the way, are being "lambasted around the world." Because there's only one person being lambasted, and I'll give you one guess who it is.

The first public remark in this whole incident was a lambasting of two individuals including a picture.

> I don't think me disproving their example

You didn't disprove anything. Whether or not the person quoted in the GGGP was publicly shamed was irrelevant. I stated this before and I'll say it one last time: the central point was the commenter's feelings and the commenter's perception of the social atmosphere. Those things are not dependent upon whether the commenter was publicly shamed, and yet, they can greatly affect the way we interact with each other.

Re: A Difficult Situation

#405

Post by stephengillie » Fri, Mar 22, 2013, 2:45 AM UTC

YuriNiyazov wrote: post #356

stephengillie wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The joke was between 2 people seated behind her -- were both engineers at Playhaven? Was the other person fired? Edit: Why the downvotes? Is there something I've missed? Does this comment really prevent further discussion on the issue?

Well, there's tons of commentary on the issue, and I think you are getting down-voted (I didn't DV you, FWIW), because you could've read or searched through them to figure out whether the other guy was fired. The answers are: if you had seen the photo in question, you'd see that the two engineers are actually wearing PlayHaven T-Shirts, which strongly implies that if one of them works for PlayHaven, then the other do…

Thanks for connecting the dots for me. I had every point of data you mentioned, but somehow didn't combine them into that information.

Re: A Difficult Situation

#406

Post by mladenkovacevic » Fri, Mar 22, 2013, 2:46 AM UTC

georgeorwell wrote: post #394

cletus wrote: post #318

I'm honestly surprised that anyone is attacking Sendgrid, defending Ms Richards, attacking PyCon or defending Playhaven in this incident. The fact is that what you do reflects on your employer to a degree. If you're a developer evangelist, that's quite a high degree, particularly if you drag them into your public spat. Most people in the media (news readers and so forth) have a "morals clause" in their contract becau…

> I'm honestly surprised that anyone is [...] defending Ms Richards Even though I think she messed up in a big way, that there wasn't sexism, that she is a hypocrite, and that she really kept asking for it, much of the aggressive abuse directed at Adria Richards since the initial event has been totally out of control, and would count as criminal hate in some countries. For starters, look at the comments on her Facebo…

Couldn't agree more.

I want to live in a world where I can make dick jokes as much as the next guy, but the response to this scares me a billion times more than the possibility of getting reported/fired/beat-up/shamed for making some insensitive joke.

Many of us are basically rabid babies foaming at the mouth to join some mob, and go wage a holy war against something controversial just so we could calm our own insecurities and complexes. Why are so many people (men mostly) so adamant in expressing their opinion on this one particular issue. Yeah we get it, she messed up and you're indignant.. now shut the fuck up. And then there are other ones who feel that because of the way she handles herself, Adria Richards becomes fair game for anonymous and violent rape threats, being called cunt and bitch... and the 'civilized' ones somehow shrug it off with a "Well.. she brought it on herself.. internet is a cruel place, and she rubbed it the wrong way." This kind of shit makes me more convinced than ever that humanity won't end with a meteor strike or a giant earthquake, but a mob of assholes with superman complexes and pitchforks going around making sure that people understand their vision of justice.

Re: A Difficult Situation

#407

Post by bluedanieru » Fri, Mar 22, 2013, 2:49 AM UTC

powertower wrote: post #313

drhayes9 wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Argh, Jesus, I'm sick of people misrepresenting this tweet! She's not saying that black people can't make racist statements and that they get a completely free pass when it comes to being racists. She's not. Stop saying that she is. She's defining racism with a particularly sociological bent. She's saying that racism is an act by an oppressor towards the oppressed. When an oppressed person insults an oppressor they a…

> When she says "black people can't be racist towards white people" she is saying "the oppressed cannot, themselves, oppress their oppressors" . That's why they're called "the oppressed". Then why didn't she just say it like that? Because that re-definition is always used to attempt to silence or de-rail whoever points out that racism is not exclusive to the white race. The word racism is already clearly defined. The…

But, then they can't push their agenda with loaded language! Did you consider that?

Re: A Difficult Situation

#408

Post by dinkumthinkum » Fri, Mar 22, 2013, 2:53 AM UTC

ForrestN wrote: post #327

powertower wrote: post #98

They need to update that statement with the fact that the joke was not about her, nor directed at her. Their statement leaves that very important part out, making the reader think otherwise - that she was the victim. At the same time (or around that time) this was happening, here is a conversation she was having - http://i.imgur.com/nRC5J7f.png Another gem from years ago - http://imgur.com/5tbXR2c I'd imagine she was…

This whole situation makes me deeply uncomfortable. First, because it demonstrates the extent to which a company can be brought to its knees by a group of hostile people organized online. Second because hundreds and hundreds of men here and elsewhere seem quite happy to align themselves with an overtly sexist, violently threatening campaign against an individual whose views they disagree with. I am not in a position…

Hogwash. Where's the evidence that the people pictured said anything. Which one said what? At best this is potentially libelous. If you had video of them saying it or a photo of them making gestures, this is one thing. As well, the statements were not, per se, as far as I have heard, misogynistic.

If the facts of the case were different and we had the same response, I would probably side with you. However, it seems like this person is throwing a little temper tantrum and it is, apparently, a pattern of behavior of her's that doesn't help anyone. It's also very poor judgement for someone representing a company at a conference.

It seems a little silly to me for someone that is allegedly an evangelist for a tech company not to know how the Internet works.

As for the racism bit, since you brought it up, no it was a moronic statement without real basis.

I don't think Sendgrid cowed at all. I think this person has a history, apparently, of baiting situations and causing herself to be a spectacle, very inappropriate for a representative.

Re: A Difficult Situation

#409

Post by Steuard » Fri, Mar 22, 2013, 2:53 AM UTC

dinkumthinkum wrote: post #342

drhayes9 wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Argh, Jesus, I'm sick of people misrepresenting this tweet! She's not saying that black people can't make racist statements and that they get a completely free pass when it comes to being racists. She's not. Stop saying that she is. She's defining racism with a particularly sociological bent. She's saying that racism is an act by an oppressor towards the oppressed. When an oppressed person insults an oppressor they a…

You're trying very hard to fight for her. Fight the good fight. But it's delusional. She's clearly making a moronic statement. It is stupid on many levels, including rigorous and sociological levels. Many racists, even if they are white, which apparently under your's and her paradigm are the only ones that can be racist, are not in any position of power. If you take some old white, filthy, dirt poor racist, and compa…

These issues are not as simple as you think they are. Race and gender are at least as complicated as, say, physics or programming. Unless you've done substantial and reasonably formal study of these topics, it turns out that you're going to misunderstand a lot of things. (At the very least, just as physicists use very specific, formal definitions of concepts like "work" and "energy", people who study race and gender use very specific definitions of their terms, too.)

I'm not an expert and I can't possibly explain even the basics of this topic in a comment here; heck, it was only a couple of years ago that I used to make comments a lot like what you said above. But in a nutshell, members of a broadly less privileged group (like "blacks" or "women", in our society) are all subjected to a whole range of harmful actions and attitudes that the corresponding more privileged group is mostly unaffected by. So when a rich black guy makes prejudiced comments about the poor white guy, it's one guy being a jerk. When the poor white guy makes prejudiced comments about the rich black guy, he's not just being a jerk, he's reinforcing centuries of racially oppressive behavior and helping to normalize those lingering stereotypes in the minds of everyone who hears him, which in turn encourages further prejudice (often unconsciously) by all of those people (including the rich black guy, by the way: that sort of thing is great at magnifying self-doubt). My understanding is that there's an abundance of formal research showing that this perspective on prejudice and racism is an accurate depiction of reality.

So maybe you object to the experts on this stuff re-using the colloquial word "racism" to refer specifically to this narrower concept of "prejudice plus (group) power" rather than just being a synonym for prejudice. I can't blame you for that frustration, since it does make informal conversations difficult; my physics students often have similar issues when I tell them that "momentum" has a somewhat different formal meaning than it has in everyday language. But I'll say this: to my eye, the more formal, narrow definition of "racism" is one heck of a lot more relevant to everyday conversations that use the word than the formal definition of "momentum" is!

Re: A Difficult Situation

#410

Post by ceol » Fri, Mar 22, 2013, 2:54 AM UTC

burntsushi wrote: post #404

ceol wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but he tried to use it as an example of something that could lead someone to shame him. But... it didn't happen. I don't know many people who would shame someone for assuming an unknown programmer is a man. It sucks, because it does kind of exclude women, but the default gender in our lexicon is aliased to "male." It was pretty tough for me to stop using it and start using "they" instead. It wasn't as tough for…

> Yeah, but he tried to use it as an example of something that could lead someone to shame him. Right. > But... it didn't happen. So? > I don't know many people who would shame someone for assuming an unknown programmer is a man. I don't know many people who would shame someone for saying "I'd fork him on GitHub" or making irreverent "dongle" jokes either. But clearly, they exist. And clearly, public shaming can do s…

Ugh, I really hate it when people split posts up like that. It gets unwieldy and strips the post of its overall context. I'm guilty of it, but I've been trying to cut back. It makes my posts smaller since I have to reply to the meat of it, you know? Not just its individual components.

Anyway, I'm saying that someone who would feel threatened by accidentally assuming a male gender might not necessarily be on their side, and their assumption might just be misguided. That invalidates the rest of his post, since it all relied on him feeling threatened when the threat doesn't exist.